There's Life on Mars?

Well, one smart scientist is 90% sure, and who am I to argue with him? But as the Gershwins once memorably put it, who calls that livin’? The Martian “life” is…bacteria. And pretty tiny bacteria at that.

It’s a start, I suppose. But it’s sure not what Ray Bradbury had in mind. Not at all. My generation (pre-Boomers) was quite certain that we’d get to most of the planets, and Mars had a place of special honor and sex appeal. Space travel was taken for granted–OF COURSE we were going to do it. Only dullards thought otherwise.

So the “news” about Mars is a double disappointment. First, Martian life is microscopic, which is extremely disappointing (the existence of life on the Red Planet is simply an article of faith for us, so we’re not impressed to find that the scientists have caught up with us). And second, we never got to go romp around there ourselves. Which is serious bad news.

I once heard Bradbury lecture to a group of businessmen, maybe a thousand or so, in his home town, Los Angeles. He didn’t like traveling, and was intensely afraid of flying, and if I remember rightly he didn’t drive himself, he took taxis, which in L.A. is like proclaiming yourself an alien. In that talk–one of the most dramatic I have ever heard–he gave us moral uplift. And linked it to Mars. Listen up.

He’d written the most famous book ever about Mars, and in his middle age he was invited to come over to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to watch the pictures come in from the first earth vehicle to get there. It was very early in the morning, maybe around five o’clock, and the pictures started arriving. They were amazingly good pictures, and the scientists in the JPL were very excited. Some were drinking champagne. Others were even crying, they were so proud and excited.

In the middle of it all, Bradbury told us, “Some TV journalist shoved a mic into my face and he growled at me, ‘Well, Bradbury, how do you feel? All these years you’ve been writing about Mars, dreaming about Mars, talking about Mars, and the first earth ship lands on Mars…and there’s no sign of life anywhere! So tell us, how do you feel?'”

And Bradbury, to his enormous credit — and this brought a lot of us in his audience to tears — said, “I looked into the TV camera and I said ‘Fools! Fools! There IS life on Mars. It is US.'”

Amen, bro. That’s what America’s all about.